"Free Libya": A Report from Benghazi (Chulov)

Photo: ReutersMartin Chulov of The Guardian, one of the first foreign journalists to cross into the country on Tuesday, reports from Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city, now held by the opposition:

At the heart of the city where he launched his rise to power, Muammar Gaddafi's indignity is now complete. In little more than three days of rampage, the rebels in Libya's second city have done their best to wind the clock back 42 years --- to life before the dictator they loathe.

Benghazi has fallen and Gaddafi's bid to cling on to power, whatever the cost, has crumbled with it. There is barely a trace of him now, except for obscene graffiti that mocks him on the dust-strewn walls where his portraits used to hang.

Residents who would not have dared to approach the town's main military base without an invitation were doing victory laps around it in their cars. Every barrack block inside had been torched and looted. The stage where Gaddafi would address the masses on the rare occasions that he came here had collapsed. His house across the road had been ransacked and there wasn't a loyalist soldier inside.

"He is gone. A dragon has been slain," cried Ahmed Al-Fatuuir outside the secret police headquarters. "Now he has to explain where all the bodies are."

The Middle East's longest ruling autocrat seems disinclined to do that, or to go quietly. His rambling speech on Tuesday night, in which he vowed to die in his homeland as a "martyr", has convinced many in Benghazi that although they may have ousted their foe from eastern Libya, they have not seen the last of the bloodshed.

At the city's hospitals, administrators are still tallying the toll from the most savage fighting seen here in decades. At the al-Jala hospital, at least 65 deaths have been recorded since 17 February, along with dozens of injuries, many of them horrific. And they are still coming in.

A Libyan soldier, who along with many of his colleagues had joined the anti-government insurgency, was pronounced dead as the Guardian arrived inside the overworked intensive care unit. A small bullet wound near his right kidney had caused irreversible chaos inside his body.

"They are still out there," said the doctor who pronounced him dead. "These mercenaries who are hired by Gaddafi are lurking in the shadows."

Wherever they are hiding, they must be running out of arms. All day defecting troops and officers were lugging in thousands of pounds of ammunition to a courtyard inside the secret police headquarters on Bengazi's waterfront. By the day's end an arsenal that could easily supply an army brigade was piled up. There were plastic explosives, rockets, machine guns and even the anti-aircraft weapon that was used to mow down demonstrators as they assaulted the military base on Sunday.

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